Why do African universities teach Kant as a “moral philosopher?”

Immanuel Kant as a moral philosopher? Please tell me this is a joke. What moral precepts did he contribute to the molding of the African personality, consciousness and existence? Would you label someone who called you an ox, who said you should be driven apart with thrashings a moral philosopher? Yet this is what Kant said of Black Africans.

Worst still, would you take someone seriously if he wrote voluminously about how married couples should relate to each other when in fact he himself never had the courage to marry? Kant may be a giant in European philosophy, fair enough why shouldn’t he be, but to teach one concept and live the other is unethical.

One enters the department of philosophy in a typical African university and they are teaching Kant, Hegel, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, Descartes etc. The irony in all this epistemological blunders is that there are probably more sages in Africa than there are elsewhere. Why not primarily teach the aphorisms of African sages as African philosophy. Wouldn’t that be more plausible and logical and even meritorious to Africa?

I suspect it’s part of the imperialist and neo-colonialist agenda. Now the typical African philosophy student knows about only European philosophers. If that’s the case then they shouldn’t call what they teach “African philosophy.”

I see Ghanaian university students and how they behave all the time and I can say they are not politically conscious. No wonder there has never been an intellectual revolution in any African university.

Our students are training for the job market, not to be intellectual and never as revolutionary. The education is meant to help us pay tax and then buy the things we import from the Europe like coffee that we grow and export to them to process.